"I'm not a person anymore": The "survivor syndrome" and William G. Niederland's perception of the human being

Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and neurologist William Guglielmo Niederland (1904-1993) received widespread acclaim for his research on Holocaust survivors, yet his other psychoanalytic work has yet to achieve comparable recognition. In this article, I will examine the affinities between Niederland's study of the Holocaust survivors and other major works in his canon to demonstrate the cohesive nature of his worldview, philosophy, and psychoanalytic trajectory while also illuminating Niederland's portrait of the human being. This work is divided into two sections. The first section will deal with what I have termed as "the phenomenological sensitivity" which articulates Niederland's unique intellectual approach of subjectively retracing his patients' phenomenal experiences. The second section will discuss Niederland's image of the human being at the nexus of space and time, as it emerges from a comparative reading across his various writings. Ultimately, the article will present these two recurrent elements not only to help identify Niederland's integrated worldview which extends throughout, but also beyond his trauma work with Holocaust survivors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

'Never forget': fictionalising the Holocaust survivor with dementia

This article asks what the reasons are for the frequent linking of the image of the Holocaust with that of dementia in contemporary discursive and representational practice. In doing so, it analyses some of the numerous 21st-century examples of fiction, drama and film in which the figure of a Holocaust survivor living with dementia takes centre stage. It explores the contradictory cultural effects that arise from making such a connection, in contexts that include expressions of fear at the spectacle of dementia, as well as comparisons between the person living with that condition and the inmate of a concentration camp. Detailed consideration of novels by Jillian Cantor and Harriet Scott Chessman as well as a play by Michel Wallenstein and a film by Josh Appignanesi suggests that the fictions of this kind can appear to provide solace for the impending loss of the eyewitness generation, yet also offer potential for a model for caregiving practice to those living with dementia in broader terms.

Holding on to history and each other: The unexpected LGBTQ legacy of a Czech Holocaust survivor and a Torah scroll from her hometown

A Czech Holocaust survivor rescued by a Kindertransport in 1939; a long-lost Torah scroll, rediscovered in 1964, from a Jewish community wiped out in World War II; a German American lesbian who converted to Judaism in 2001. Three disparate stories, unfolding decades apart, converge in one memorable encounter, a Kristallnacht commemoration in Los Angeles organized by Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), the world's first LGBTQ synagogue, which leads to an enduring friendship and fresh insight into contemporary queer Jewish life. In this personal essay, longtime BCC member Sylvia Sukop interweaves history and autobiography to explore the beauty and power of ritual, the resonance of the "Choose life" passage in Deuteronomy that her congregation reads from its rescued Czech scroll every Yom Kippur, and the many forms that good deeds and survival can take. Progressive faith communities, the author suggests, and the traditions in which they are rooted make space to witness and affirm the fullness of one another's humanity, bridging differences and fostering unexpected kinship in a brutally divisive world.

Born in Auschwitz and Survived: A Triumph Over Murderers

The discovery of Jewish babies who were born in Nazi concentration camps and survived seems miraculous, but this phenomenon did occur toward the end of World War II. The lives of a small group of mothers and surviving children are of both historical and medical interests. Their survival shows additional support for the hypothesis that maternal nutrition can induce metabolic syndrome and bone demineralization in their offspring. Information obtained through direct contact with some of the surviving children is the basis for this article.

The fate of Hungarian Jewish dermatologists during the Holocaust: Part 2: Under Nazi rule

At least 564,500 Hungarian Jews perished during the Holocaust, including many physicians. Exactly how many Jewish dermatologists were killed is not known. We have identified 62 Hungarian Jewish dermatologists from this period: 19 of these dermatologists died in concentration camps or were shot in Hungary, 3 committed suicide, and 1 died shortly after the Holocaust, exhausted by the War. Fortunately, many Hungarian Jewish dermatologists survived the Holocaust. Some had fled Europe before the Nazi takeover, as was described in Part 1 of this contribution. Two Holocaust survivors, Ferenc Földvári and Ödön Rajka, became presidents of the Hungarian Dermatologic Society and helped rebuild the profession of dermatology in Hungary after the War. This contribution provides one of the first accounts of the fate of Hungarian Jewish dermatologists during the Holocaust and serves as a remembrance of their suffering and ordeal.

‘The Demolition of a Man’: Lessons From holocaust literature for the teaching of nursing ethics

The events of the Holocaust of European Jews (and others) by the Nazi state between 1939 and 1945 deserve to be remembered and studied by the nursing profession. By approaching literary texts written by Holocaust ‘survivors’ from an interpersonal dimension, a reading of such works can develop an ‘ethic of responsibility’. By focusing on such themes as rationality, duty, witness and the virtues, potential lessons for nurses working with people in a variety of settings can be drawn. Implications for the teaching of nursing ethics are made in the areas of the virtues, relationships, professional ethics and the moral community of nursing.

Simulation-extrapolation method to address errors in atomic bomb survivor dosimetry on solid cancer and leukaemia mortality risk estimates, 1950-2003

Analyses of the Life Span Study (LSS) of Japanese atomic bombing survivors have routinely incorporated corrections for additive classical measurement errors using regression calibration. Recently, several studies reported that the efficiency of the simulation-extrapolation method (SIMEX) is slightly more accurate than the simple regression calibration method (RCAL). In the present paper, the SIMEX and RCAL methods have been used to address errors in atomic bomb survivor dosimetry on solid cancer and leukaemia mortality risk estimates. For instance, it is shown that using the SIMEX method, the ERR/Gy is increased by an amount of about 29 % for all solid cancer deaths using a linear model compared to the RCAL method, and the corrected EAR 10(-4) person-years at 1 Gy (the linear terms) is decreased by about 8 %, while the corrected quadratic term (EAR 10(-4) person-years/Gy(2)) is increased by about 65 % for leukaemia deaths based on a linear-quadratic model. The results with SIMEX method are slightly higher than published values. The observed differences were probably due to the fact that with the RCAL method the dosimetric data were partially corrected, while all doses were considered with the SIMEX method. Therefore, one should be careful when comparing the estimated risks and it may be useful to use several correction techniques in order to obtain a range of corrected estimates, rather than to rely on a single technique. This work will enable to improve the risk estimates derived from LSS data, and help to make more reliable the development of radiation protection standards.

Leo Eitinger MD: tribute to a Holocaust survivor, humane physician and friend of mankind

Born in Czechoslovakia, psychiatrist Leo Eitinger (1912-1996) became internationally recognized for research on his fellow concentration camp inmates. He graduated as an MD in 1937, but being Jewish was prohibited from practicing as a doctor. When the Nazis occupied the area he was forced to flee to Norway, where in 1940 he was again deprived of his right to practice medicine. In 1942 he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. There, as a physician inmate, he was able to help and in many cases save his fellow prisoners, not only with his medical skills but by falsifying prisoners' documents and hiding them from their Nazi captors. One of his patients was Elie Wiesel. Eitinger survived the camps but was forced to join a "death march." After the war he resumed medical practice in Norway, specializing in psychiatry. With his personal experience and knowledge of the suffering of camp survivors, he dedicated his life to studying the psychological effects of traumatic stress in different groups. Eitinger's academic contributions were crucial in the development of this area of research--namely, the effects of excessive stress, laying the foundations for the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder and the post-concentration camp syndrome, thus facilitating recognition of the medical and psychological post-war conditions of the survivors and their resultant disability pensions.

Mental health, citizenship, and the memory of World War II in the Netherlands (1945-85)

After World War II, Dutch psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals articulated ideals of democratic citizenship. Framed in terms of self-development, citizenship took on a broad meaning, not just in terms of political rights and obligations, but also in the context of material, social, psychological and moral conditions that individuals should meet in order to develop themselves and be able to act according to those rights and obligations in a responsible way. In the post-war period of reconstruction (1945-65), as well as between 1965 and 1985, the link between mental health and ideals of citizenship was coloured by the public memory of World War II and the German occupation, albeit in completely different, even opposite ways. The memory of the war, and especially the public consideration of its victims, changed drastically in the mid-1960s, and the mental health sector played a crucial role in bringing this change about. The widespread attention to the mental effects of the war that surfaced in the late 1960s after a period of 20 years of public silence should be seen against the backdrop of the combination of democratization and the emancipation of emotions.

The deployment of ethnographic sciences and psychological warfare during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion

This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts, seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the times of "emergency." The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku Mutua and other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many journalists today have commented on the recovery of "lost" colonial archives and the denials of former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers, Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the commentaries on the "Mau Mau" mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past injustices.

Women and children first? The administration of Titanic relief in Southampton, 1912–59

One of the principal narratives woven around the 1912 sinking of the Titanic is that the tragedy united people around the world in a shared sense of horror and grief. This study examines the administration of the relief fund collected for victims and questions the established image of social unity and collective suffering. The records of the Southampton Titanic Relief Fund reveal welfare processes imbued with class and gender prejudices that consigned many of the relatives of victims to poverty-stricken lives, despite the massive fund collected in their names.

"God must have been sleeping": faith as an obstacle and a resource for Rwandan genocide survivors in the United States

In 1994, 1 million Rwandans were violently killed in only 100 days. Devastating for some Rwandan survivors was the significant role that some Catholic parishes and leaders took in ignoring, facilitating, and even perpetuating the genocide. This article seeks to understand how Rwandan genocide survivors draw on religion as they negotiate their postgenocide identities in the United States and comprehend their current faiths, beliefs, and practices. Based on qualitative interviews with Rwandan survivors now located within the United States, I argue that the experiences of religiosity postgenocide serve as both an obstacle and a resource in postgenocide life, creating significant individual and local ramifications for community engagement, reconciliation, and trauma recovery.

Healing the wounds of our fathers: intergenerational trauma, memory, symbolization and narrative

This paper explores the history of psychoanalytical approaches to intergenerational trauma, both from the Freudian and from the Jungian schools, and addresses the need when we speak of intergenerational or transmitted trauma to better define the nature and the different categories of trauma with particular reference to extreme and cumulative traumas such as those experienced by the survivors of the Nazi death camps and the Russian gulags. Therapy with survivors and with their children requires a particular adaptation of analytical technique as what is at stake is not so much the analysis of the here and now of the transference and countertransference dynamics which indeed can in the early stages be counterproductive, but the capacity of the analyst to accept the reality of the trauma with all its devastating and mind-shattering emotions without losing the capacity to imagine and to play metaphorically with images, essential if the patient is to be able to create a space for representation.

[The meaning of "apology": the survivors of Nazi medical crimes and the Max Planck Society]

Around the turn of the twenty-first century a new practice in international politics became established: representatives of political, economic and religious organisations apologised for the historical and political crimes of their own collectives, addressing the victims or the victims' descendants. At a public event in June 2001, a formal apology of this kind was made by the president of the Max Planck Society (MPS), who had previously launched an extensive programme of research into the National Socialist history of what was then the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The majority of the eight invited survivors of human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps refused forgiveness. Instead, they called for the MPS not to content itself with historical research and analysis, but to ensure the continued remembrance of the victims and their suffering. Starting from this 2001 ritual of repentance, the paper examines the participants' diverse views of how to deal with the medical crimes of National Socialism, and asks about possibilities of going beyond historical retrospection to fulfil the imperative of remembrance.

We fall down: the African American experience of coping with the homicide of a loved one

Rates of homicide among African Americans are much higher than those of other racial or ethnic groups. Research has demonstrated that homicide can be psychologically debilitating for surviving family members. Yet, exploring the experiences of homicide victims’ surviving loved ones has received little attention. This study examined the coping strategies of African American survivors of homicide. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 8 African American family members (ages 18-82) of homicide victims. Survivors were recruited from the Massachusetts Office of Victim Services and from homicide survivor support, school, and community groups throughout the New England area. Interviews were conducted using open-ended questions derived from coping, support network, grief, and bereavement literatures. Results indicate that the primary coping strategies utilized by African American survivors of homicide victims are spiritual coping and meaning making, maintaining a connection to the deceased, collective coping and caring for others, and concealment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Examining the long-term racial disparities in health and economic conditions among Hurricane Katrina survivors: policy implications for Gulf Coast recovery

This study examines disparities in the long-term health, emotional well-being, and economic consequences of the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes. Researchers analyzed the responses of 216 Black and 508 White Hurricane Katrina survivors who participated in the ABC News Hurricane Katrina Anniversary Poll in 2006. Self-reported data of the long-term negative impact of the hurricane on personal health, emotional well-being, and finances were regressed on race, income, and measures of loss, injury, family mortality, anxiety, and confidence in the government. Descriptive analyses, stepwise logistic regression, and analyses of variance revealed that Black hurricane survivors more frequently reported hurricane-related problems with personal health, emotional well-being, and finances. In addition, Blacks were more likely than Whites to report the loss of friends, relatives, and personal property.

Infant mortality and the health of survivors: Britain, 1910–50

The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid improvements in the health and height of British children. Average height and health can be related to infant mortality through a positive selection effect and a negative scarring effect. Examining town-level panel data on the heights of school children, no evidence is found for the selection effect, but there is some support for the scarring effect. The results suggest that the improvement in the disease environment, as reflected by the decline in infant mortality, increased average height by about half a centimetre per decade in the first half of the twentieth century.

Normative collective behavior in the Station building fire

Objective. This article offers a test of the normative explanation of collective behavior by examining the fire at the Station nightclub in Rhode Island that killed 100 and injured nearly 200 persons.Methods. Information on all persons at the club comes from content analysis of documents from the Rhode Island Police Department, the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General, and The Providence Journal. We use negative binomial regression to test hypotheses about the effects of group-level predictors of the counts of dead and injured in 179 groups at the nightclub.Results. Results indicate that group-level factors such as distance of group members at the start of the fire, the number of intimate relations among them, the extent to which they had visited the nightclub prior to the incident, and the average length of the evacuation route they used predict counts of injured and dead. The research also looks at what behavioral differences exist between survivors and victims, ascertains the existence of role extension among employees of the nightclub, and provides support for the affirmation that dangerous contexts negate the protective influence of intimate relations in groups.Conclusion. We argue for the abandonment of current emphasis on irrationality and herd-like imitative behavior in studies of evacuation from structural fires in buildings and for the inclusion of group-level processes in social psychological explanations of these incidents.

The limits of oral history: ethics and methodology amid highly politicized research settings

In recent years, oral history has been celebrated by its practitioners for its humanizing potential, and its ability to democratize history by bringing the narratives of people and communities typically absent in the archives into conversation with that of the political and intellectual elites who generally write history. And when dealing with the narratives of ordinary people living in conditions of social and political stability, the value of oral history is unquestionable. However, in recent years, oral historians have increasingly expanded their gaze to consider intimate accounts of extreme human experiences, such as narratives of survival and flight in response to mass atrocities. This shift in academic and practical interests begs the questions: Are there limits to oral historical methods and theory? And if so, what are these limits? This paper begins to address these questions by drawing upon fourteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda and Bosnia-Hercegovina, during which I conducted multiple life history interviews with approximately one hundred survivors, ex-combatants, and perpetrators of genocide and related mass atrocities. I argue that there are limits to the application of oral history, particularly when working amid highly politicized research settings.

Why does the Great Chinese Famine affect the male and female survivors differently? Mortality selection versus son preference

Evidence shows that exposure to nutritional adversity in early life has larger long-term impacts on women than on men. Consistent with these findings, our paper shows a higher incidence of disability and illiteracy among female survivors of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961). Moreover we find that the better health of male survivors most plausibly reflects higher male excess mortality during the famine, whereas the observed gender difference in illiteracy rate is probably better explained by the culture of son preference.

The League of Nations' rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920-1927

The essay centers of the efforts by the League of Nations to rescue women and children survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. This rescue -- a seemingly unambiguous good -- was at once a constitutive act in drawing the boundaries of the international community, a key moment in the definition of humanitarianism, and a site of resistance to the colonial presence in the post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing from a wide range of source materials in a number of languages, including Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, the essay brings the intellectual and social context of humanitarianism in initiating societies together with the lived experience of humanitarianism in the places where the act took form. In so doing, it draws our attention to the proper place of the Eastern mediterranean, and its women and children, in the global history of humanitarianism. The prevailing narrative of the history of human rights places much of its emphasis on the post-World War II era, the international reaction to the Holocaust, and the founding of the United Nations. yet contemporary human rights thinking also took place within practices of humanitarianism in the interwar period, and is necessarily inseparable from the histories of refugees, colonialism, and the non-West.

Hurricane Katrina and mental health: a research note on Mississippi Gulf Coast residents

Katrina was the most devastating and deadliest hurricane in recent U.S. history. The storm was particularly destructive for residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast where sustained winds of 135 mph and a storm surge of 32 feet literally obliterated the built and modified environments. Limited research exists on the chronic (32 months) mental health impacts of survivors in this geographical area. Random-digit dialing telephone surveys were administered in Harrison and Hancock counties (Mississippi) in April and May 2008 and data were collected on a number of mental health outcomes. The results of the calculation of Oridinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models revealed that females, African Americans, and less-educated residents manifested the most severe mental health impacts. Most important, consistent findings for depression and Katrina-related psychological stress indicate that residents who were separated from family members, had maximum residential damage, and suffered severe financial problems remained significantly impacted 32 months after Katrina’s landfall. A secondary stressor, in the form of having applications to the Mississippi State Grant Program denied or not processed also predicted personal depression. The implications of these findings are discussed.

"Cattle car complexes": a correspondence with historical captivity and post-Holocaust witnesses

This article explores critical complexes relating to the construction of historical captivity in deportation train journeys by examining fictional and testimonial accounts of that experience. Using Thane Rosenbaum’s short story "Cattle Car Complex," the author shows that fiction is a prism through which to view victims’ experiences of deportation-experiences that tend to be overlooked in interpretive literature about the Holocaust. Historians have examined deportations above all as a perpetrator narrative, utilizing contemporaneous documents and sources. Their treatment neglects the numerous testimonies about the debilitating effects of deportation travel, as well as the evocation of that traumatic transit in post-Holocaust texts and contexts such as fiction, film, art, and museological and commemorative practice. The author argues that sensory witness is a compelling paradigm that can reveal the silences and elisions in representations of historical captivity.

Shackleton's men: life on Elephant Island

The experiences of the 22 men from Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition of 1914-1916 who were marooned on Elephant Island during the Antarctic winter are not as well known as the narrative of the ship being beset and sunk, and Shackleton's open boat journey to South Georgia to rescue them. Frank Wild was left in charge of the marooned men by Shackleton and saved them from starvation and despair. The morale of the men in the face of extreme exposure to the elements, the ingenuity of their devices for survival and their diet, conversation and entertainments all reveal heroic qualities of Shackletonian endurance.

A review of the history of traumatic stress studies in Japan: from traumatic neurosis to PTSD

Based on available literature, this review article investigates traumatic stress studies in Japan from the late 19th century to the present for English speaking audiences. First, traumatic neuroses of war victims, A-bomb survivors, and victims of work-related accidents are discussed. Second, traumatic stress studies of victims of other manmade disasters, such as the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo, domestic violence, and burn injuries. Third, psychological outcomes of natural disaster studies are discussed in relation to social support and help-seeking tendencies of Japan disaster victims.

[Genocide--some medical and psychological aspects]

The Nazi genocide of the Jews was the background for the UN Convention on Genocide in 1949. The number of people murdered according to the definition in the UN Convention in the period 1900-87 has been estimated at 37 million; the real number is probably higher. Genocide is a considerable cause of death, it has severe consequences for survivors, is an irreplaceable loss for surviving relatives and a trauma for the collective identity. Fair trials of the perpetrators is important to the victims and society. The disastrous role of medicine in the Holocaust should be included in educational programmes as a reminder of the vulnerability of the health professions.

["Perhaps, the night, I cry while I write": strategies for survival of p.v.p. patients]

The history of modern psychiatry has been written by people who have made a career of studying the world of mental health. Especially since the 1960s, many historians, journalists, sociologists and psychiatrists have described and analysed the contradictions of this new science and its applications to specific clienteles. What about psychiatric survivors themselves? How do they view their experience? What is their opinion of the care they have received? Few studies have looked at their written version of psychiatry. This article explores some of the writings signed by survivors of psychiatry to determine how they assess their experience. For this exploratory study, 5 sources are looked at: 1 in Ontario, 2 in Quebec, 1 in New Brunswick and 1 on the World Wide Web. The author stresses the potential of these "voices of experience" and the unique abilities of the victims of psychiatry to describe and analyse the oppression they have been through.

The replacement child. Variations on a theme in history and psychoanalysis

This paper reviews the literature on the replacement child syndrome and examines its historical, theoretical, and biographical ramifications. Although a replacement child in a literal sense is one conceived to take the place of a deceased sibling, the concept may be extended to many other situations in which a child is put in the place of someone else in the family system. In his experience of survivor guilt for his deceased brother Julius, Freud may be regarded as such a metaphorical replacement child. The collective tragedy of the Holocaust gives the replacement child concept a special meaning, since the children born in its aftermath had to fill the void in the lives not only of individual parents but of the Jewish people as a whole. One of the coauthors of this paper, Leon Anisfeld, was born after World War II to parents who had lost previous spouses and children, and his personal experience as a replacement child informs the theoretical issues considered here.

'Patient' voices, social movements and the habitus; how psychiatric survivors 'speak out'

What is the 'voice' of the mental health 'user'? This paper seeks to address this question through the presentation of a detailed comparative analysis of two anthologies written by people living with mental 'illness' in the 1950s and 1990s. Using a narrative-style qualitative analysis, the structure and content of the two anthologies is explored. The analysis illustrates the way in which the 'voice' of the mental patient in the 1950s was very different to that of today. The paper then aims to provide a theoretical explanation that accounts for this transformation of voice. Appropriating theoretical concepts from phenomenology and sociology, in particular, Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus', the paper explores the way in which the 'personal' voice of the mental patient is formulated in dialogical relation to wider public and collective movements. These, in turn, connect to broader transformations in the social, economic and health 'fields'.

Written on the body: narrative re-presentation in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and after

In "re-membering" the atrocities inflicted on her body and those of her comrades in the Nazi concentration camps, the French memoirist Charlotte Delbo avoids the linear time scheme and the metaphors for self that have traditionally defined autobiography as a genre. Instead, her depiction of time is circular, and the depiction of self and other is that of dismembered bodies and fragmented psyches. As conditions for the French political prisoners improved late in the war, numbed emotions thawed and Delbo's group began to recapture their pre-Auschwitz identity by reviving their pre-Auschwitz language. In recording testimonies garnered more than twenty years after the war, Delbo demonstrates that although the women were forever frozen in the time-space continuum of Auschwitz, they were also bonded into something larger than the sum of their once "dismembered selves."

[Fate of the Viennese Jewish pediatricians 1938-1945]

The article summarizes the first results of an attempt to reconstruct the destinies of the Jewish pediatricians of Vienna after the German occupation of Austria in March 1938. Traditionally pediatrics in Vienna were characterized by a high percentage of Jewish specialists. In 1938 they were confronted with abrupt humiliations and persecutions by the sudden introduction of the Nazi racial laws. The paper describes the foregoing, developments in Germany since 1933 and analyses the fates of 96 pediatric specialists of Vienna, who were affected by these events.